A City and A Tower

This weekend we went to see our parents in the airy state of PA. I say airy, because of the space.  It’s almost like six feet was always too close for the people of Pennsylvania.

Everywhere I looked, I saw people with the same expression on their face. What was it?Confusion? Numb bewilderment? It’s almost as if we got wiped out by the junk food virus.

I’m not making claims about Pennsylvanians, mind you.  I see the same look in the eyes of my Marylanders and my New Yorkers. I see it on the TV people. I hear it in the voices of the NPR reporters.

Our wits are dulled so we can’t tell the good medicine from the bad. We can’t remember if it was it Echinacea or  Hydroxychloroquine that was suppose to cure boredom. Or maybe it was Socialism?

But this weekend the weather was nice and my in-laws are sweet and so are my parents. They, like us, were confused.  Every conversation seemed to end with the phrase “…well who knows!”

And it was enough! It was enough to not-know together. Grandmothers and Grandchildren do not fret about the trials of man.  Their world is right and good so long as they are together.

But during that respite–my first kid free moment in a long time–I had a brief moment of clarity.  The fog lifted and I had to think of the Tower of Babel.

You remember how…forgive the butchering…those ambitious folks from Shinar who spoke “a unified language and were one”  decided to build a city and tower in the the same zip code as heaven and how god was like “NOPE.”

And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
⁷ Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.
⁸ So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth:

Savage, I know.  Like who’s going to hate on a people’s imagination?  But that’s the Lord. We can’t all be so decisive.

What I wonder is this: In those early days when people couldn’t understand each other and had to struggle and toil to make sense of what only a few minutes ago was perfectly clear; and all that energy spent on the politics of naming things, each day climbing out of the pit of confusion–cast there by the Lord himself– And which, maybe, after eons they were able to start a school of some kind with stone desks and no dry erase markers (thank god); and which itself grew into a university which produced a body of accepted knowledge, so each generation of Shinar people developing those first, early pictographs and then letters and then writing devices and finally Twitter, Facebook and WordPress could finally build that tower and city–maybe not in real life–but in the life of the mind.

Did those people feel any closer to heaven then?  Or did they finally get to the heights, look around and say, “who knows?”